Improving the Offense & Plate Discipline

Jason Donald Impatient vs Carlos Santana's Patience by the numbers

As discussed in the Improving the Indians Offense & Kenny Lofton post which focused on baserunning, the 2010 Indians offense was bad.  The team was held to 2 runs or less 57 times posting a 4-53 record,  had an additional 53 games with either 4 or 5 runs scored and posted a losing record of 21-32, and in the  55 games where they scored 5 or more runs and  posted a record of 44-11.   The team offense  ranked 12th in the league in runs scored with 636 (3.99 R/G), 12th in batting average at .248, 10th in OBP at .322, 13th in SLG% at .378, and 13th in OPS at .700.    

By the numbers the Indians were a patient team as they saw more pitches per plate appearaance than league average and finished 6th in the American League in walks, but along with drawing walks the Indians were also second in the league in striking out.  It should be noted that this combination has little relation with winning or losing as the Tampa Bay Rays led the American League in both walks and strikeouts in 2010.

Plate discipline data can be found on nearly every statistic website and be quite cumbersome to absorb the different acronyms and definitions.  I am going to display some of the data from two websites (http://www.statcorner.com/ & http://www.fangraphs.com/) and provide the defintions below.  Hopefully, this will allow you to draw a conclusion on a guys performance in 2010 or hypothesize on an area that you feel that a player can improve.   The first set of data is for the projected 2011 Cleveland Indians roster and is data collected from http://www.statcorner.com/ for the 2010 season.  The data includes Austin Kearns 2010 data from Cleveland and New York and due to small sample size Grady Sizemore's 2009 and 2010 is included.  The following metrics are included in the table below:

• P/PA = Pitches Per Plate Appearance.
• SW% = the percentage of pitches the hitter swings at.
• Mis% = the percentage of pitches the hitter swings at and fails to make contact with.
• Tak% = the percentage of pitches the hitter takes for a strike.
• kL% = the percentage of plate appearances resulting in a called stikeout.
• kS% = the percentage of plate appearances resulting in a swinging strikeout.
• uBB% = the percentage of plate appearances resulting in an unintentional walk.
• iBB% = the percentage of plate appearnces resulting in an intentional walk.

The second set of data is collected at fangraphs.com.   Fangrpahs data may be used to judge if the player is swinging at balls in or out of the strike zone and if he is making contact with those pitches.  The fangraphs data for the projected 2011 Cleveland Indians is provided below and includes Austin Kearns 2010 NY and Cleveland data and due to small sample size Grady Sizemore's 2009 and 2010 data is included.

• O-Swing% = percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone.
• Z-Swing% = percentage of pitches a batter swings at inside the strike zone.
• Swing% = percentage of total number of pitches a hitter swings at.
• O-Contact% = percentage of times a batter makes contact when swinging at a ball thrown outside the strike zone.
• Z-Contact% = percentage of times a batter makes contact when swinginga at a ball thrown inside the strike zone.
• Contct % = total percentage contact made when swinging at all pitches.
• Zone% = total percentage of pitches seen inside the strike zone.
• F-Strike% = percentage of first pitch strikes.